Yale University. Divinity School

“ When a nation, patient and forbearing until her enemies scoffed and her friends grieved, found herself compelled to defend her unquestioned rights against lawless and brutal pirates, minds which approved of preparedness for war would naturally, almost inevitably, approve of war. Nor was it our rights only. We entered the struggle not through pride or greed or hatred, but as the champion of international law, righteousness, liberty, democracy, and a world peace that shall be abiding and just for all. ”

“ If the enemy can be won, win him. Turn the other cheek, surrender tunic along with cloak. But forbearance is not meant to play into the hands of the evil power. There is also a time when it only gluts the ravenous maw of inhuman, soulless tyranny, a time when incarnate evil sits in the very temple of God, setting itself forth as God, a time when the law of violence is openly avowed and exalted above the law of mercy and right, a time of the beast and the false prophet, threatening to turn civilization back again to the age of Lamech and Tubal-cain. ”

“ The rule of truly Christian pacifism is not hard to understand when we approach it from the standpoint of those who after the precept and example of Jesus seek first the Kingdom of God. Men of this type are ready like "all the saints who nobly fought of old" to lose their lives in this high cause, that they may save them unto life eternal. For individuals and for nations the rule is the same: "In thine own cause strike never, not even in self-defence; in God's cause strike when he bids thee strike and cease not, come victory or death." ”

“ Is this great hope Christian? Is Christianity the religion which a hope so high and so difficult needs if it is to keep its height amid the many influences that tend to lower it, and if it is to prove possible and become actual in spite of powerful forces that work against it? It is not self-evident that Christianity will prove equal to this which is clearly the greatest task that the present imposes upon it. There are many who doubt its adequacy; many who see that it has brought division and warfare, and think it unfitted to create unity ”

“ The literalism of the historian is, of course, to us true and immediately helpful in liberating us from bondage to the letter of an ancient book. It leaves us free to apply our own reason and conscience and experience to the interpretation of our own life and times. It turns us back upon our own souls, upon our faith, our desire, our will, to unveil and shape the future. But the historian is in danger of doing less than justice to the ethical and spiritual contents of the hopes of the Bible because of his very love of truth and willingness to sacrifice his wishes to it. ”

“ Here is a sentence from his greetings to France on Bastille Day, 1918: "The War is being fought to save ourselves from intolerable things; but it is also being fought to save mankind." And as a final word from President Wilson, taken from his discussion of the new international morality: "My urgent advice to you would be, not always to think first of America, but always, also, to think first of humanity. You do not love humanity, if you seek to divide humanity into jealous camps. Humanity can be welded together only by love, by sympathy, by justice, not by jealousy and hatred." ”

“ It was an amazed world, rudely roused from its comfortable slumbers, which found these forces organized for battle; it will be a bloody and dishevelled but determined and aggressive world that, when our men have laid aside their khaki, will strive to hold them in the ranks of an equally fearless and fighting army, which will never retreat from its trenches until these enemies of the world's peace and happiness are driven from the field. Men who hated dirt and discomfort, blood and vermin, have endured and laughed at them for the sake of their cause and their country. ”

“ The war has made love itself a hope. We renounce it for a time that we may resist a power that threatens to destroy it altogether and put selfishness and cruelty on the throne of the world. But the war has not in fact disproved the faith that God is love and that love is the supreme law and power among men. It has made mankind more conscious of its ideal of community and fellowship, and seems to be carrying us faster toward the realization of human brotherhood than peace and prosperity were doing. ”

“ The unifying power of him whose life illustrated even better than his parable of the Good Samaritan the highest law of human relationship is not in evidence today. Where is the power of that cross, the vision of which carried with it still another vision of a world attracted to, and unified by, the power of self-sacrificing love—"And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me"? Is the power of sacrificial love drawing the hearts of men and of nations together in the fellowship of Jesus Christ? Are not the dominant forces operating today centrifugal rather than centripetal? ”

“ The moral sense of the whole nation has become militant. The brave men and women of this land are working and fighting for human betterment with their eyes upon that social order which hath foundations whose builder and maker is God. And because we feel that our cause is just, we feel in our arms and in our hearts, each man of us, the strength of ten.
May we not believe that this country, strong and brave, generous and hopeful, is called of God to be in its own way a Messianic nation in whose mighty unfolding life all the nations of the earth may be blessed? ”

“ Foreign missions will have a new and poignant meaning for all the world. We knew before that the bubonic plague in Calcutta was a menace to San Francisco; we know now that the cult of militarism in a single group in Germany can crucify mankind. No chaplain will ever settle down into a parish as if it were a "pent-up Utica." No cultivation of individual piety will atone for the failure to Christianize society, leaven industry with the principles of Jesus, and convert from its Machiavellian heathendom and Bismarckian brutality the diplomacy of the old-time state. ”

“ The men of our time are shaping the hope of a united and friendly human family of free peoples, united not only against war but for all kinds of mutual help and coöperative progress; and the Bible, the prophets of the Old Testament, Jesus and Paul in the New, are the chief creative sources of just such hopes. These hopes must have religion beneath them if they are to endure and be realized in spite of their powerful foes, the fears and hatreds which materialism and selfishness create. And Christianity is the only religion which has the quality and the right to meet this need. ”

“ It is the deed of a brother of all men who declines to be limited by his cloth, who cannot preach to the soldier without drinking the soldier's cup and being baptized with his baptism of mud and of blood. It is the spirit of a true Christian preacher, who cannot urge Christian laymen to "go over the top" unless at least some Christian ministers go with them. It is the jubilant response to the call of the heroic, the comradeship which knows no secular and no sacred, and which covets the most intimate fellowship in the life and sufferings of brave men. ”

“ It is only by the establishment of an Imperium in imperio through obedience to what the Duke of Wellington called the Christian's Marching Orders, the Great Commission, that the new reign of the Prince of Peace can become possible. If the blood-soaked "savagery of civilization on the march to save the world from the civilization of savagery" is the dolorous duty of the present hour, there is solace in the thought that Golgotha was but the prelude to the Resurrection and Ascension. The Ascent of Mankind in all its nations and peoples and kindreds and tongues is at hand. ”

“ The hope of a league of free nations, of a federated world in which democracy is safe, is clearly seen by those who see best what it involves and what obstacles stand in its way to be first of all the hope for a new spirit among men, a new inward temper, a new will; it is also seen to be something universal in its range. Not again one league against another, but a league that at least aims at being inclusive of humanity. Spirituality and universality, inwardness and good-will, belong to the hope that is now inspiring the nations; and these are just the marks of the religion of Christ ”

“ The entry of the United States into the world-war has been in a degree unexampled in the history of this country a response to the appeal of righteousness. No action in which the nation has ever engaged has been so unselfish. We have taken our part in the struggle without hate, and with full consciousness of the prospective cost in life and treasure, that certain principles of justice may prevail, and that despotism, brutality and falsehood may not dominate the civilized world. ”

“ Paul and John knew the mind of Christ in this striking quality of it better than later generations. The spirit of God is already a love that creates unity and fellowship among men; and it is already the presence and power of divine and eternal life. The Christian hope unites the community and the individual, and contains the clue to the mystery that now obscures our minds. We know that the ruthless sacrifice of individuals for the abstract idol called the State is a denial of Christ's reverence for the human personality. ”

“ Why should not America walk in the footsteps of Jesus, set her face steadfastly toward her Jerusalem, and for the world's salvation suffer Germany and Austria and Turkey to drive the spikes through her hands? Why not permit the Central Powers to seize and possess our country, even though they dealt with those of us, who could not and would not submit to the ethics of Nietzsche and the diplomacy of Bernhardi and the rule of von Hindenburg, as they treated the fathers and mothers and little children of Armenia and Belgium and Poland? "Resist not evil!" ”

“ Until the God of the race supersedes in actual belief and practice the God of nationalism; until the God and father of all mankind displaces in our belief the God of sect or of one religion rather than of another; until the God of absolute and universal righteousness takes the place in our minds and hearts of the God of partiality and favoritism, which is the God of injustice; men and nations will not be bound together in one great and glorious fraternity. ”

“ While men are talking of peace and of the great progress of civilization, there is heard in the distance the noise of arms, gathering rank on rank, east and west, north and south, and there come rolling toward us the crushing thunders of universal war.... There is but one other system to be tried, and that is the cross of Christ—the system that is not to be built upon selfishness nor upon blood, not upon personal interest, but upon love. ”

“ Will this deep, elemental, common religion of America come to understand itself, and to recognize its fundamentally Christian character? The answer to that question lies with the churches. And there are clear indications that many of them, at least, will not fail to realize and meet their opportunity.
Not that we shall do without dogmas. Religion cannot maintain itself as mere ethics. It is a way of living; but a way of living that justifies itself by a way of believing about God and duty and immortality. ”

“ They are the questions of thousands of earnest men and women who face the supreme crisis of human history. They bring home to us the fact that religion, even in its highest form, like international law, like morality, like art, however promotive of human brotherhood it has been, has failed in this most crucial test to prevent the dreadful work of the destructive forces of mankind. This is a fact that the sincere believer in religion must face whether he wants to or not. ”

“ Right makes God's will, surely enough; but is it certain that the side whose cause is just will win the war, simply because it is the side of right and of God? Ultimately, we may be sure, right must prevail, for wrong is not the sort of thing that can permanently succeed; it contains within itself the germs of its own ultimate destruction. But nothing in history can be surer than that this ultimate judgment upon evil does not necessarily involve the defeat of all unjustified military undertakings. The side with the greater moral justification has not always won its battles, nor even its wars. ”

“ We are not undertaking to dictate to the German people what sort of government they should have. We are willing they should have any sort of government they like, so long as they keep it for home consumption. We believe here that all governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. We confess to a frank preference for the methods of democracy, and we could wish no happier lot for any land than to live under the reign of the common people. ”

“ The outstanding fact remains that while the German Government appeals to the self-assertion of the German State and seeks its aggrandizement through force at the expense of its neighbors, the allied governments appeal to national self-sacrifice for the sake of international redemption. It is to this appeal on behalf of the rights, the freedom, the happiness of mankind, that our soldiers respond; for humanity, not for national gain, that our peoples are prepared to give and to suffer. ”

“ Shall the world, which has become a neighborhood, organize itself into a great community of mutual respect, good will and brotherhood, or shall its structure be that of restless orders of exploiters and exploited? ”

“ But such arguments, we may well hope, will no longer win the uncritical assent that they have sometimes found. German education may be more efficient in the fulfilment of its end than American education—but what an end it has sought and reached! In the moment of our temptation to undemocratic short cuts in education, we shall henceforth look to the Germany of yesterday and today, and shall be strengthened to resist. Her ways are not our ways. Her schools cannot be ours. Education must mean to America something quite different from what it has meant to Germany. ”